We Speak Geek

James Trauben was loosed from his prison beneath the surface of New Jersey over two decades ago and exiled to California, lest he draw further strength from his native soil. Contained for a time within the eldritch halls of California State University Chico, he has emerged bearing a Bachelor's degree in History and an array of religious and philosophical trivia.
As the stars are unripe for his ascension, he makes ends meet as a technical writer and columnist/editor for Pixelated Geek.
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Starcraft Universe, the fan-made massive-multiplayer-online project, released its first full-length trailer today, featuring raid footage from the current build.

The brand-new trailer will feature gameplay footage of the first “raid” in Starcraft Universe, and will be available here, on the project’s YouTube account, and on their brand-new site.

It’s been a long, strange, exhausting odyssey for Ryan Winzen and his creative team, but he has no complaints about any of his interactions with Blizzard. “For as big as they are, and as hard as they work on games, Blizzard is way above the bar when it comes to their community relations,” he said. “It’s not easy having millions of fans and appeasing them all, but all I can say is they’ve been good to me, and have definately made improvements on how they interact with the mapping community in general.”

The fan project has pushed the very limits of the Starcraft 2 engine – it’s no small feat to use a map editor originally intended for real-time-strategy games for an MMO. Ryan and his fellow developers have built “hundreds of work-arounds” to get the engine to operate in the desired fashion. For example, they discovered a potential cap in the number of triggers any given map can execute around two weeks ago – something as far as they know no other fan project has ever discovered.

“SCU executes more triggers than any Blizzard map or Custom game out there right now,” Winzen said. “I’m not even sure if they [Blizzard] know it exists or not.” He hopes to discuss the issue directly with Blizzard to find ways to overcome it.

A project like Starcraft Universe takes an enormous amount of work. Fortunately, Winzen’s assembled a talented team to work on the project.

Mille is my right hand man. Without Mille there would be no SCU. He codes most of the systems and UI elements. My buddy ProzaicMuze is our resident data editor expert that helps me with a bunch of the content design. Prozaic is also very well known in the modding community for his tutorials regarding the data editor. Malfate is our Web Master who will be coding most of our web stuff, including a system which functions a lot like the armory in World of Warcraft. (He also created the popular “Dragon Kill Points” system of loot distribution in World of Warcraft.) And finally, Dark Revenant, who created our physics engine. DR is also very well known in Starcraft II for his popular “Mafia” mod. We also recently added another member, OneTwo who is well known in the modding community for his tutorials.

Though the project’s a long way from completion, Winzen and his team hope to release a teaser in the future. “PVE [Player vs Environment] definitely won’t be out until Heart of the Swarm,” he said. “PVP arenas will be out before Blizzcon. That’s all I can say without getting peoples’ hopes up.”

“That being said,” he added, “we will publish a raid boss teaser over Battle.Net sometime this year, so people can get a taste of what it’s like to actually raid in SC2.”